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Friday, November 25, 2016

Birthday Bash!

Today, I'm excited to be a part of my friend's book birthday bash! When I first heard about Faith Blum, her book titles intrigued me (I mean, combine hymns and western and I'm so hooked!). I have since gotten to know this lovely young lady and recommend her books for those who like clean westerns. If you're a writer, keep reading to the end of the post, because I invited Faith to share some of her research gold mines. But first, let's celebrate!!

November 19th
was the third birthday of Faith's debut novel, AMighty Fortress. To celebrate, she has all sorts of fun going on. First,
she’s released a newly revised version of A
Mighty Fortress. Second, she has most of her published books on sale.
Third, she’s releasing the box set of all five of her novels for a special
discounted price. And fourth, but not least, she now has the audiobook of her
AMF available! Read on for more party fun.

ABOUT THE BOOK

“Stay back!”
Joshua ordered. He kept his eyes on the
scene below while waving his arm in Ruth's direction. “Get deeper into the woods and stay down low
to the ground.”

Joshua
hazarded a glance behind him. He could
no longer see Ruth and breathed a sigh of relief. In one swift move, he grabbed his rifle and
lay flat to the ground. Extending the
rifle, he aimed at the shorter man whose gun was pointed at Bradshaw.

Joshua and Ruth
Brookings are traveling by stagecoach to finally join their parents in Montana. Attacked by
murderous outlaws, the teens barely escape with their lives and must survive in
the barren Wyoming and Montana territories and escape the man who's
hunting them.

Seven years
ago, Jed Stuart ran away from home and joined Tom's gang. Jed is tired of the
lawlessness and wants out. The only problem? He is the boss's right-hand man
and will never be able to leave. And what's one more stagecoach robbery,
anyway?

Can Joshua lean
on God's strength to keep himself and his sister alive until they find a
town? Will Jed be able to face his
anger or will it consume him completely? All three are running--the hunter and
hunted. What will happen when they meet?

Amanda actually sent this link to me, but I have found it
extremely helpful. On the sidebar there are also options for other name
generators, so even if you don’t write during the Old West, you could probably
find something useful.

When I decided to connect many of my series’ together, I
knew I needed to create some family trees so I made sure not to duplicate too
many names, that this couple really could
have a baby in this year, etc. Family Echo is a great place to create family
trees.

I got this book just last
year, but it has been a wonderful reference for everything Wild West. If the information
wasn’t specifically in this book, there was a bibliography at the end of each
chapter. Using that bibliography helped me find other books I could use to
research pretty much anything I needed.

I can’t believe I was
able to write without this book before! The
Emotion Thesaurus has been absolutely essential to helping me add better
descriptions to my books. I highly recommend getting a paperback copy of this
book.

I haven’t used this one a
lot yet, but I got it from the library first and used much of the info I found
in there, so I bought it, too. What I have used, was extremely helpful to make
my books more accurate, especially since I’ve never personally done any ranch
work.

I use this search engine
a LOT. It is my go-to search engine for one simple reason, the founders knew
security and privacy are important. They use Google search results, but they
will not track your IP address, your searches, or target ads to what you
searched for. That’s kind of comforting to authors since they don’t really want
a government organization to come knocking at the door asking where the bomb is
that they are building…

Those are the top seven
research tools I can think of at the moment. I’d love to hear about some that
you may have found, though, so feel free to share in the comments.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Faith Blum
started writing at an early age. She started even before she could read! She
even thought she could write better than Dr. Seuss. (The picture doesn’t show
it well, but there are scribblings on the page of Green Eggs
and Ham). Now that she has grown up a little more, she knows she will
probably never reach the success of Dr. Seuss, but that doesn’t stop her from
trying.

When she isn’t writing, Faith enjoys doing many
right-brained activities such as reading, crafting, playing piano, and playing
games with her family. One of her dreams is to visit Castle City, Montana,
someday to see the ghost town she chose for her characters to live in. She
currently lives on a hobby farm with her family in Wisconsin.

There are many ways to connect with Faith online.
All of them can be found in one convenient place: http://FaithBlum.com. Onher website you can find links to her various social
media sites and both of her blogs.

Mega-Sale

Every eBook in the Hymns of the West series is on sale. A Mighty Fortress is permafree, and the
other eBooks in the series are $0.99. In addition, the spin-off novella series
has a book on sale as well.